It’s been three months since we announced anything for Percona Cloud Tools, not because we’ve been idle, but because we’ve been so busy the time flew by! Here’s the TL;DR to pique your interest:

EXPLAIN queries in real-time through the web app

Query Analytics for Performance Schema

Dashboards: customizable, shared groups of charts

Install and upgrade the agent with 1 command line

Unified UI: same time range, same host wherever you go

Percona Cloud Tools for MySQL is a hosted service providing access to query performance insights for all MySQL uses. After a brief setup, unlock new information about your database and how to improve your applications. There’s a lot more, but let’s just look at these five new features…

EXPLAIN queries in real-time through the web app

Like many people, to get a query’s EXPLAIN plan you probably copy the query, ssh to the server, log in to MySQL, then paste the query after typing “EXPLAIN”. With Percona Cloud Tools’ new real-time EXPLAIN feature you can simply click a button. It’s a real timesaver.

The EXPLAIN plan is a vital part of diagnosing the query. Now with Percona Cloud Tools you have a lot of powerful information in one place: the query, its metrics, its EXPLAIN plan, and more–and more to come, too!

Query Analytics for Performance Schema

The MySQL slow log is a wealth of indispensable data about queries that you cannot get anywhere else. That’s why it’s the default for Percona Cloud Tools Query Analytics. Like most things, however, it has tradeoffs: for one, it can be time-consuming to parse, especially on very busy servers. Or, in the case of Amazon RDS, the slow log may simply not be available. That’s ok now because with MySQL 5.6 or newer (including Percona Server 5.6 or newer) you can parse queries from the Performance Schema. It’s not as data-rich as the slow log, but it has the basics and it’s a great alternative (and sometimes the only alternative) to the slow log.

Dashboards: customizable, shared groups of charts

Metrics Monitor has a default dashboard (a collection of charts) for MySQL. The default dashboard is a great start because it’s created by us (Vadim, actually) so you know it’s relevant and meaningful for MySQL. However, it presents only a fraction of the data that percona-agent collects, so we need more dashboards to organize and present other data. Now you can create new dashboards which are accessible to everyone in the organization. For example, Peter was recently benchmarking TokuDB, so he created a TokuDB-specific dashboard.

Install and upgrade the agent with 1 command line

As of percona-agent 1.0.6, you can install, upgrade, and uninstall the agent with a single command line, ran as root, like:

For many environments this is all you need for a first-time install of a new agent. The install will auto-detect MySQL, configure, and run all services by default. You can tweak things later in the web app. This also means you can install percona-agent in an automated environment.

Unified UI: same time range, same host wherever you go

Like most projects, Percona Cloud Tools has evolved over time. Consequently, certain parts of the web app were different than other parts. These differences had workarounds, but now the system is unified. Pick a MySQL instance, pick a time range, then view whatever part of the app you want and these selections will stay the same. This is, of course, a natural expectation because it allows you to see easily examine a specific system at a specific time range from different perspectives.

There’s a lot more, but we don’t want to take up too much of your time!

Percona Cloud Tools is still in free beta, but not for much longer, so be sure to sign up today!